SES Report: Day 2

So the second day of the conference is drawing to a close. I am putting together this quick post to cover some of the basic events of the day before heading up the Googleplex to attend the Google Dance. Today I checked out 3 sessions:

Blog & Feed Search SEO

News Search SEO

Meet the Blog & Feed Search Engines

As you can see, I remained focused on social search type stuff, reflecting my current bent. It amazes me how much new opportunity out there. If you missed the growndswell that ocurred when SEO took off, fear not, its all happening again. Blogs, News Search, and RSS feeds all offer marvelous oportunities to develop reams of new traffic to web sites.

Good content is king. Content equals traffic. Well more precisely put, smartly marketed content equals traffic. The number of opportunities can seem bewildering at first. You can get confused and not know where to focus your efforts. But ultimately the way you focus your efforts should be determined by what is best for your audience.

For example, if you are in a technically oriented business, you should check out Techmeme. Its a simple tech news site, or so it seems. But rockstar bloggers check it religously for new news. Get onto Techmeme, and you quickly become a player on Digg and the other related services.

The News Search session had some real nuggets. First and foremost, if you think that press releases is about getting links you are wrong. Google completely discounts and links it finds in a press release. They have no value. However, press releases can get you in front of the right audiences.

There is a right and a wrong way to optimize press releases. Search keyword tools don’t cut it, because they report search volumes. The people who search in news sites use completely different terms. Use the built in features of Yahoo News and Google News that will show you the popular news search terms related to your press release.

Also interesting is finding out who the king is. It’s not Google. Yahoo News has more than 3 times the search volume of Google News. And does it all matter? You betcha. More people get their news online today in the US (31%) than from TV (28%). And why not? It’s easier, it’s faster, and it’s on demand.

And watch for the advent of IE7. This beauty incorporates an automatic discovery of RSS feeds. In addition, instead of showing cryptic XML files, IE7 will render the content like a web page. These things together threaten to make RSS fully accessible to the general public. While the IE7 release data is still not clear, its release could being about an explosion in the use of RSS.

If you have done a good job developing feeds and making them available on your sites you could be in great shape. RSS feeds help lock in users to your site.